like my people, my
thoughts
poems
head
love
history
all are scattered.
and now that my matriarch is dead,
what
where
who
am i?
why did you leave me like this?
i don’t feel ready.
poetry
ahava
from now on, whenever a hebrew or yiddish word bubbles up into my heart, I will not allow myself to suppress it like I shamefully do my tears
I will let my lost languages, mame loshn, the tongues that put me in the skin of my ancestors, I will let those words burst out of my chest like fire
I will let them burn the skin of anyone who shames me for speaking a language i hold on to
languages too heavy for me to carry, the diaspora has made my arms weak but I will not let go.
i want to talk to g-d
i want to talk to g-d but loshn kodesh – the language that g-d speaks – hits my heart without passing through my ears.
i want to talk to my ancestors but mame loshn draws more laughs in this place than smiles of recognition.
i ache to speak the languages of my people, languages that taste like the desert and ghettoes, sand and glass, fire and resilience, but instead i speak common tongues like english and french and latin – i feel like crying because they are familiar in a way that my own languages may never be.
what does diasporic sorrow feel like?
what does diasporic sorrow feel like?
it feels like my chest tightening with tears i’m not sure i’ll shed. my throat hurts, a lump is trying to escape from it.
it feels like my body tensing up in wait. i still don’t know what i’m waiting for.
it feels like a constant buzz of anxiety. like the kind i get when i don’t know if i’ve locked my front door, except there’s no home to go to at the end of the day to check.
it feels like the desert. hot. dry. my eyes sting like when sand gets in them.
it feels like confusion. like in the cartoons i used to watch, with a question mark flitting around my head. i can’t even express what i’m confused about, half the time.
it feels like the burst of sadness when i realize that the language my mother spoke to me as a child isn’t a made-up language after all. it’s the language of my people. it’s a language we all used to speak.
it feels like the frustration when my siblings and friends and i share pieces of our histories with each other, trying to make pieces of different puzzles fit together as one. none of us were born complete.
it feels like i am constantly justifying why i am, where i am, who i am, what i am. to the point where i question my own truth.
it feels like it will never get better. i will never know anything.
it feels like i will feel this way forever.
most of us always have, anyway.
passover [submission]
passover (poem) [submission from hamletrash.tumblr.com]
remember when your skin first felt like a
disease, like every pore if you squeezed it
would spit cold cyanide
remember when you were a slave in the house of bondage
remember the blood on your thighs. remember
the plague of boils, the plague of blood,
the plague of cattle disease
(you used to have a toy a
cow with a button on its foot
push the button and its joints buckled
and collapsed)
pretending as you
scrubbed your sheets
that this was the blood of a man you’d killed
remember that spring when god peeled your skin off and ate it like bread
the terror of how your zipped coat
looked when you sat down
the waves and bubbles the zipper made.
like eve under trees
the sudden alien weight of her body
this is the bread of affliction
god spits blood in the river, god
whispers into your bed
kisses your neck full of boils
god in a breath of lice that squirm through
your firstborn’s hair
god bound between your eyes and
upon the doorposts of your houses
god’s blood in the nile
lamb’s blood on the door
cows’ blood in the fields
your blood in the sink
stick your smallest finger in the wine
she said to find my element…
my element is smoke.
dirty, captivating, floating, dissolving… choking.
my punishment is ephemerality, impermanence.
i am fascinated by the macabre
and also terrified.
my penance is letting go –
i self-sabotage and end up in purgatory.
there’s a smoke machine manned by spirits smoking cigarettes that smell unfamiliar – that one: a cigar.
my job, they say, is to clean the air by breathing:
it gives me anxiety and
the spirits shape-shift into various things they know unsettle me
so i name them Puck 6, Puck 2, Puck 5/
my least favourite small numbers.
when i get out of here, i will take up smoking again.
i will blow smoke in the face of everyone i see
and end up back where i came from –
unless i decide to change.
which i might.
take heart
In times of sorrow, take heart, even
though you stand at deaths door: the
candle flares up before it dies,
and wounded lions roar.
- Samuel Ibn Naghrila/ Samuel haNagid
